 Okay, very good morning to you. Hope you had a great weekend. It is the 1st of February Monday and much of the talk of the town this morning is about silver I'm going to touch upon it and we're definitely going to look at the charts because silver futures are up around seven percent a Gap up opening a bit of a drive at the open of electronic trade last night as Europe come in It's teetering around its initial highs seen in the overnight session Tim and I one of the senior traders we did a Short video last night for the community that we put out. So please refer to that if you want to see more detail Specifically to get under the bonnet of why that move is happening But I am going to give you as I said a bit of an overview and let's kick things off straight away With that because I kind of want to then put it aside to talk about there is other things going on right now Has been a very interesting time, of course because obviously coming on the coattails of GME and all of these other Kind of heavy short stocks that were being in focus from the kind of reddit Wall Street bets crowd It definitely is still dominating a lot of the media cycle at the moment But I think it's important that this week from a macro perspective. There are lots of other things going on We've got over a hundred companies in the S&P reporting. You've got Amazon got Alphabet You've got a number of important macroeconomic data points the ISM PMI numbers coming out this week ADP non-farm payrolls You've also got bank decisions coming out the RBA the BOE, so there is other things going on I know it's hard to to realize that given the the media fascination with these kind of shorts Stocks and the squeeze that are going on from the retail community for the moment away from that thing It's important just to understand that from the broader asset classes that I know a lot of our guys look at Which is the core kind of more traditional? Index futures in terms of say the currency pairs dollar based Commodities and respect to oil gold definitely adding in silver for sure We need to monitor so any potential spillover that we might have from this kind of reddit community But other than that, you know, there are other Driving factors and in particular things like the stimulus as well, which I'm going to update you on in a moment in the US So let's just talk about silver quickly then what what is going on? And perhaps I could just get the chart up quickly and we can have a look at what's happened the overnight to give some context so Here's the silver chart, and I'm looking here at price activity year-to-date So if I just draw a line here This would mark then the price activity we've had since the beginning of the year essentially So we saw a bit of a drop-off as we went through around the first week of the month Of January, but then if you actually look going back to what would have been very early Thursday morning if you remember it was midweek last week when we had the likes of Robin Hood and other brokers interactive brokers and so on all stop trading and some of those focus stocks like GME and AMC and so on and then it was kind of the The leader of the swarm as Tim put it was putting out kind of trade thesis about how they could target silver and how that would be again a good Philosophical target to punish what had been For many different reasons an argument that the banks have had control manipulating that price And so what we've seen since then is Almost a 20% gain in Looking at silver futures here from where we were trading just last since last Thursday So the gap up that we've had in the overnight session Was seven percent and look you can see here as Europe are coming in Definitely, there's a lot of attention on this story and look we've just pushed through session highs here as I've studied hitting the record Button on this briefing so new session highs now 2945 at the high and if I stick silver on a daily There's absolutely no reason now that we won't have I'm sure a look and a test up and around the The $30 mark which really puts us up at that that peak that we saw when gold saw this really rapid rise Instead with the lights that we saw with Gold when the gold broke above 2000 back last summer and definitely from a characteristic point of view In terms of price ratios and so on silver generally acts like gold on steroids when it really starts moving It's a particularly lively character as a product So yeah, just keeping an eye on this today for sure the context of this of course comes on a few different things one of the things and the reason why the talk has shifted to Silver specifically is given the idea then that a number of brokers are limiting access to some of these stocks in play like GME IG for example one of the biggest brokers for the retail market in the UK Said on Saturday that it was restricting any new positions in the likes of GameStop and AMC due to extreme market conditions What we have seen as well over the weekend is Few other things the data from the end of last week the world's largest silver back trading Exchange traded fund so the ISHA silver trust recorded as you can see in this graphic here One billion dollars in inflows on Friday by far the largest of seeing ever since the creation of that fund And that came amid reports that the premium for physical silver Sword late Friday and into Saturday and as Sunday rolled over there was lots of reports on Things like zero hedge for example showing a lot of these Boolean dealers facing shortages of actual physical coins now the idea here being That by buying shares in the ETF you're going to force Physical delivery of silver into funds of volts and thereby looking to create this kind of short squeeze on the market and push up Consequently the price of silver a couple things here to be aware of On a more broad Basis it is more difficult for retail investors to influence something like the silver market as opposed to say a single stock equity Given the large off-exchange market for these precious metals a Lot of talk as well on some of the message boards last night was a lot of conspiracy theory that a lot of this kind of Deflection of attention over to silver has been artificially created by hedge funds in order to then stop the targeting of things like GME there's been a lot of noise about that as well So I'm not here to kind of speculate too much about those sorts of things, but look for the short term There is a lot of Airplay being given to this this silver story and it has played out. I mean you can't fight what you see This is definitely Being the situation I mean we've gapped up and we've seen a decent push higher and with this last little move We've had even since I've been talking when we closed on Friday. I just mark it up from a percentage basis We are now up Approximately to the high nearly 9% And that means then from that Thursday low the day after really all of that Situation with those brokers were up about 18% So definitely worth keeping an eye 30 the obvious target on the upside technically and from a psychological perspective But going to move move away from from that for a moment and have a quick chat about some other things and this is one of the other things I wanted to mention was about the Stimulus situation now this definitely could well come back into focus this week How important is it going to be? Well, this is where you've got to just monitor the ebb and flow of the discussion The headline itself I think could be Constituent as being quite negative apparently 10 Republican senators have proposed an alternative plan for COVID-19 pandemic relief costing around 600 billion dollars And they said that would gain By parts and support the census said they plan to unveil that plan today But offered some details including the proposal for direct checks of up to one thousand dollars So again the value here on the top level of the package is much smaller than what Biden proposed Obviously at 1.9 trillion as to are the direct stimulus checks Which are about 400 bucks shy of what what Biden was aiming for? Having 10 Republicans and why is that number symbolic? Well, it's significant because that's the number to reach 60 votes in the Senate to pass bills under normal procedures If you remember it's not about then a simple majority on some of these points that actually need 60 is the the golden kind of figure Unless they go through this kind of reconciliation process and so on The overall proposal then as I said is quite a bit smaller Does that constitute reason to the markets to have a bit of a nervous moment thinking that well That's considerably smaller and that's just not good enough because the markets price now for this near 2 trillion delivery Well, I'm not so sure about that because for me. This is just the natural process of a negotiation starting point a And B is always going to be wide on the initial Kind of conversation before then it gets narrowed in and compromises are made I guess the timing here is generally the further they are apart the longer it's going to take to narrow towards something that would create some sort of Consensus and that in itself I think it becomes more of a challenge then for markets to maintain a more positive outlook on on this stimulus delivery So definitely worth keeping an eye on that throughout this week for sure Having a look elsewhere Just wanted to have a quick look at the UK because some really positive news actually on the Continuation of the the rollout program of vaccines a total of nearly nine million people have now received their first vaccine dose record number of almost six hundred thousand people Which out on Saturday alone according to government data? So yeah, definitely ramping that up a quite considerable place And of course this came comes as the UK aims to offer vaccines to around 15 million people by in the top four kind Priority groups by the middle of February So does this change then the idea about the loosening of the lockdown on the timing? We'll know the government's already kind of last week moved that over at least until the beginning I think it's March 8th, so I wouldn't be expecting any shift on that, but definitely a positive thing both from let's say a markets perspective, but also, you know from a from a humanitarian perspective I think that's really pleasing to see that they're being able to accelerate that program and get more people Vaccinated just having a quick look at the the sterling charts morning. This is looking at cable. I'm looking at cable here on a 90 minute Capsulating some of the year-to-day price activity again. This is 2021 price action It's over the last month. There's a couple of areas and I am looking out for In particular here, I'll broaden this out in a longer term chart But this has been a really key level and it's another key level today In fact, you've got the R1 sitting just above this 13750 marker looking at the futures market here And that's been a real area of Upside resistance for this this market and if I flip over to a daily You'll be able to see even more so how that's played out that goes back to the 2017 Late summer high that dip that we saw in beginning in Feb of 2018 and where we fail to really push on above So, you know kind of generally what markets medium in terms view Perhaps is that we then start to see the return of the kind of dollar weaker theme and inevitably then with things like that being the key factor but Technical breaches above these levels starts to open up potentially and the next push up to cable But it hasn't materialized as yet. We've really failed to really push on or close significantly Above this point and so it's worth keeping on that today given how close proximity we are at the moment And above there the other area just keeping an eye on is that trend line that goes back from the year-to-day price action It has played out well over the last Last couple of weeks, so if we did break above here this current point of 137 50 I'll be looking out to the target up around that that trend line high Quick look elsewhere then other things to do with the UK. You do have the Bank of England interest rate decision this week I'm not particularly Getting overtly excited about this to be quite honest. There's not expected to be any type of policy change I Guess the the main takeaway points here are a few the next The budget isn't coming to early March out of the UK. So If I was an MPC official and I think this is how they'll be thinking is that look We've really got to see the government's fiscal policy For the medium term before we can make any judgment about what would be suitable for the next course of action with our own Stimulus for example, you know things like furlough. Is it going to be rolled over or not? You know, these will have tangible impacts on the economic situation And then consequently the type of policy that will be necessary to use their there they're going forward This is one of the meetings though where we do get one of the four of the eight over the course of the year We'll get the quarterly monetary policy report update Remember the last time this came out was November to the world has moved on quite a bit now now that we've reached February then in regards to predominantly how the vaccine Has been implemented the lockdowns don't were importantly have been generally longer and tighter than what people were thinking back in November And so ultimately there's probably going to be some tweaks to the likes of GDP Perhaps a little bit firmer in Q4, but a little bit weaker in Q1 I don't really think all of that really is too much for market move of the sterling The one thing that probably is going to be the talking point as this headline Bloomberg would suggest is the idea of negative interest rates I think it's very important to understand that we're not going into imminent negative rates here in the UK Could it be a policy tool in the future? Sure. It could be what we're looking out for in this meeting though is more about this Team that's been in conversation with a lot of financial institutions They're due to come back and report their findings of the feasibility study of negative rates being adopted in the UK Obviously the details around that could then give us an idea on how likely an option it really is for monetary policy in the UK That's probably the thing that will be the sweet spot to look out for Otherwise quickly just a quick word in Italy the BTP market not seeing too much movement this morning But there were reports over the weekend that Matteo Renzi of Italia Viva the chap who is responsible for the kind of just the initial disruption if you like in Italy pulling his Junior coalition support for the Conti government He came out over the weekend and basically according to a party source has said that the former ECB president Mario Draghi Could become the prime minister. He would see him as a good candidate I'd say Italian politics not It's not unfamiliar to see a technocratic Government being led by these types of officials Mario Draghi is someone who has a very high quality reputation, of course The stamp and newspaper reported on Sunday Domestically in Italy that the president Mattarella had already sounded out Draghi, so to keep an eye Moving over elsewhere a few other things and we've had a couple of data points from overnight I'm not going to get too bogged down in this because quite frankly It's not really a focal point for the way the markets performing this morning But just as an update the Chinese manufacturing both the official China manufacturing and occasion market Manufacturing PMI is weakened the official number. I think it was the slowest pace in five months in January and the market number came out last night was the lowest level since June last year or be at both numbers still above 50 in the expansionary territory Another article as well that someone did ask me about That was from the FT at the weekend was this Reports that Chinese warplanes simulated attacking a US carrier near Taiwan The revelation underscoring Joe Biden's difficulties and easy intentions with Beijing and how important this was So I kind of I kind of see this at the moment as a little bit like what we've had in recent rhetoric out of Iran Who definitely have become much more aggressive with some of their? Not just their rhetoric, but also some of their military type of movements and so on within geographically sensitive areas and obviously Taiwan is definitely one of those when it comes to the East China Sea in that area and A lot of this I think is timing the shift of the administration going from Trump to Biden I think a lot of these Countries like Iran and China just want to make a very important political point by kind of flexing their military muscle And I don't really see much more than that to be quite frank I think the overall take here is that Biden? I don't think he's really going to let up the pressure on China It's just probably going to be less erratic than perhaps the chaotic approach that we saw somewhat under the Trump administration So tensions will I expect to remain high and Definitely this ongoing trade spat is there in the background. It's just that it's being shadowed at the moment by a bigger More near-term force, which is that of code 19 of course and the restrictions in the vaccine Which ultimately I think is more important Again, one of the main thing I've had a lot of macro discussions with different people is you know I think you've got to think about then the Biden Hierarchy of needs if you can call it that what's his what's the top of his political agenda? And I think when it comes to things like China and Iran I think they just lower down to things like getting the stimulus done for example, which is definitely the top priority at the moment The other thing that's happening this week is you'd have an OPEC meeting OPEC are coming out doing their monthly kind of gathering We had some reports come out last night from a delegate and on balance taking OPEC plus as a whole compliance levels We're seen at 99% apparently for January. So still are compliant enough. Let's say How important will this JMMC meeting being that's the joint ministerial monitoring committee So it's their kind of technical task force who go in to see about these compliance levels of being a dear to I don't think this meeting is important at all to be honest They've already come out in January told what the supply cut situation would be for February and March So this is more just about a monitoring check rather than it is about anything definitive for OPEC plus policy So the main driving force is for oil I'd be looking at still things like the general market sensitivity if They do remain nervous over this whole kind of reddit retail trades Assault and certain assets, but again, I think that is a very concentrated Thing I know it has impacted silver but as far as those equity plays are concerned It's very isolated and concentrated to only a small group of stocks I don't think it's big enough to really reverberate across broader market sentiment. And so Looking at stimulus, I think will be quite key any updates, of course on the whole vaccine Covid situation will be important for the demand side for oil Earnings wise just quickly wanted to touch upon that and then we'll look at the calendar. There are 110 S&P 500 companies rewarding this week. We've got two of the Dow 30 I'm not going to go through every single one of these companies But some of the highlights would include Tuesday pre-open Pfizer Exxon mobile BP after the market closed Probably the biggest one in as far as the the bigger market cap mega Tech names are concerned Amazon and alphabet. So that's Tuesday after market other notable ones Wednesday Biogen Spotify Qualcomm eBay Thursday Merc Pinterest snap Gilead Peloton. So a couple of those names, which have seen obviously Some some substantial movement during the pandemic And that's that's pretty much it So I'd say probably Tuesday after market for an index futures trader for the NASDAQ will be definitely the one to watch out for And then let's just have a bit of a recap then for the the overall week Because there's definitely some important data points forthcoming this morning You do have the various different manufacturing PMIs from the Eurozone I would not look at these as potential market movers because these are final readings, but this afternoon is more important You've got the ISM manufacturing number for January expected at 60 So still a very robust number and up marginally from the previous 59.7 Going overnight into tomorrow. So this time tomorrow be talking and updating about the RBA But not expecting much change there in their latest rate decision rates in Aussie currently at 0.1% Then you've got the Eurozone Q4 Advanced GDP reading coming out tomorrow morning Expectations there for a contraction of 1.4% On Wednesday, then you get the service numbers out of Europe but again, these are final readings. So I'd largely disregard that bit more emphasis probably on the flash CPI reading coming out later On that morning and then from a US focus in ramps and on farm payrolls You've got ADP employment change and ISM services index now just to wrap this up into Friday's payroll figure Generally speaking, we are looking for a marginal bounce back into positive job creation in regards to what ADP's like to say And also non-farm payrolls. I think both these numbers are expected to show marginal improvements there So from a non-farm perspective expected at 55,000 that was against the previous negative 140,000 we had last month, which remember was the first negative Figure we've had in several months since really the main lockdown figure that was very low back in April So ADP's expected to be similar around plus 50 From the previous minus 123,000. So how important is that? I really don't think it's that important to be honest The numbers still relatively low because there's still a number of restrictions impacting a number of key sectors for employment Of course, the jobless rate continues to remain fairly elevated I saw a really good quote from Alice at ING, which I think summarizes the sentiment with non-farms, which is that There will be no material improvement in jobs. This is more broadly speaking until the market In jobs market until containment measures are eased and the reality is that it's something that isn't going to happen Anytime soon given the slow rate of vaccinations happening in the US at the moment So given we've heard from the FMC just last week Jerome Powell, I really don't think today's or this week's payroll constitutes a real moving of The needle if you like for the Federal Reserve in terms of their policy thinking so Definitely keeping an eye out these these days points throughout the week the ISM numbers particularly and ADP could create catalysts for movement But the overall culmination of the NFP I don't think from a monetary policy macro point of view is too much of a game changer to be quite frank Thursday, then you've got the Bank of England We've discussed and then you've got US Factory orders as well coming out then Friday as I said you've got non-farms In itself. So yeah, that's it quite a few things there to be aware of Obviously a lot of focus still on the silver market. What's it doing now? Still sitting around that initial push higher that we saw when we were showing the screen just a few minutes ago So good leave it at that let you guys get on any questions at all Feel free to drop me a comment if you've made it this far in the briefing and you're watching this on YouTube Please do like and subscribe really appreciate your support for the channel and have yourself a good week ahead Thanks very much